The milpa constitutes one of the oldest, most complex, and symbolically significant agricultural systems of Mesoamerica. Beyond serving as a source of subsistence, the milpa is a ritual and social space, closely connected to the monte and the pueblo, equally sacred spaces where human beings, the natural environment, and sacred powers interact in the production of the Indigenous landscape. The awareness and practice through which communities engage with space are historical processes linked to worldview and expressed through diverse phenomena such as cartography and the structure of communal and religious life. Although the pueblo-milpa-monte triad is characterized by differences in its inhabitants, boundaries, and practices, it is premature to conceive of these spaces as separate or opposing realities, whether in terms of nature/culture or wild/domesticated, for they are profoundly interconnected through thresholds across which cosmic forces and agencies circulate, affecting and participating in social relations and exchanges.
The milpa undoubtedly represents the domesticated space par excellence and the heart of community labor based on reciprocity. Within Indigenous territoriality, it functions as an intermediate space between the pueblo and the monte: it is simultaneously a cultivated field and a ritualized domain, subject to moral and religious norms involving the earth, the Dueños del Monte, rain, and fertility. In the Mesoamerican religious tradition, the monte is conceived as the great storehouse of sustenance, the place of animals, water, and wealth, understood as heart-seeds and the forces of fertility. The monte also contains the entrances to the underworld through caves. It is the home of the Dueño del Monte and of dangerous beings such as the “malos aires,” some of them associated with the mestizo world, with whom people negotiate passage, the extraction of resources, and the recovery of health. The growth of vegetation necessary for subsistence, as well as the well-being of the community, depends both on human labor and on the intervention of this multitude of beings.
Within the configuration of the Indigenous landscape, the monte may exhibit subtle distinctions from the cerro, particularly when productive practices, oral narratives, and the social function of the hill as an identity and territorial marker are taken into account. In numerous communities of Mesoamerican tradition, stories recount that hills were once human beings who, for different reasons, turned into stone and today serve as patrons, protectors, and boundary markers of their communities. Hills are agents endowed with will and authority, demanding offerings in exchange for granting health, rain, and food. For this reason, in regions such as the Huasteca, ritual deposits serve to reproduce the sacred landscape by marking the patron hills and presenting offerings both to them and to the beings who inhabit them.
In its productive dimension, the monte encompasses the milpa, a living space and the dwelling place of the spirit of maize (Chicomexóchitl among the Nahuas), a deity who visits farmers in dreams when the heat becomes oppressive. A young Tepehua farmer from Veracruz recounts that his ears of maize appear to him as small thirsty children, suffering from a lack of water. The ear of maize and the child are bodily forms, phytomorphic and anthropomorphic, of the maize deity through which it communicates with human beings. In the Huasteca region, Hñahñu (Otomí), Nahua, and Tepehua ritual specialists make anthropomorphic figures from industrial paper and amate, which serve to embody the sacred maize plant, the remaining subsistence crops (chili peppers, squash, peanuts, and different varieties of fruit), and the various beings that populate the world. Only through these devices is it possible to exchange gifts between humans and entities, both beneficent and maleficent.
“Los Costumbres” are agricultural and therapeutic rituals in which hundreds of paper cutouts are fashioned, sacred bodies to whom sacrificial offerings, food, prayers, dance, and music are presented. These ceremonies are led by ritual specialists endowed with the gift of paper-cutting, that is, the ability to recognize in dreams the bodily forms of the entities. They may be communal or private and are generally carried out in special temples known as casa de costumbre or Xochicalli ("house of flowers" in the Nahuatl language). For the Nahuas of the region, this space is considered part of the dwellings of the pueblo, even when located at its margins or in the monte. During these rituals, the pueblo, the milpa, and the monte are reproduced according to different symbolic codes and spatial-temporal logics such as inside/outside, above/below, east/west, among others.
In this way, beneficent entities such as saints, ancestors, cultivated plants, the sun, fire, the beneficent wind, and the Owners of the earth and water are generally clothed in miniature garments, usually in Indigenous attire, although there are exceptions. Throughout the day they are honored with foods made from maize, bread, coffee, atoles, and chicken dishes, served on plates arranged according to specific numerical codes. Because of their beneficent character, associated with the pueblo, houses, life, and ancestors, these Lords are placed inside the casa de costumbre, some on the upper part and others on the lower part of the altar, thus reproducing a cosmogram. In contrast, the malos aires, “devils,” deceased who died in disgrace, and other maleficent beings associated with illness, social conflict, and misfortunes receive offerings outside the house, directly upon the earth, consisting of cigarettes, dismembered food, bread, coffee, and alcoholic beverages.
Once the feast has concluded, the space occupied by the malos aires (evil winds) is purified through a cleansing rite, and the paper bodies are deposited in, or returned to, the monte. The bodies of the seeds and beneficent entities, by contrast, are safeguarded in a chest, a metaphor for the interior of the monte, until the following year, when they are revitalized with new clothing and fresh offerings. This diversity of bodies and spaces, differentiated yet interconnected, expresses the integral conception of the world characteristic of Indigenous thought.